Tag Archives: Ann Gaylia O’Barr

Time to Live in Another Way

Working for the U.S. government overseas, I’ve spent a lot of holidays away from home. I’m thankful not only for being home this year with family but also grateful that I’ve satisfied that wanderlust that I knew as an adolescent and young adult. I’m thankful for the good times I had with numerous friends in many countries, but I no longer feel a need for physically wandering and exploring.

Instead, I enjoy making sense of what i experienced and writing the thoughts for others—whether in essay form or in some kind of story. The desire to have purpose is still there, but in recounting and writing rather than in physical experience.

I’m blessed beyond measure and offer thanks what I’ve had and for the meaning I’m still making from what has happened and for the time to pass it on.

 

 

It Begins with Obedience

Mark 16

            The old story is recorded: the women, who, unlike the men, had not deserted Jesus, were not through serving Him. They were going to risk being found at Jesus’ tomb, but they wanted to continue to care for Him, even it if it meant only caring for His body, so they thought.

            Doring the best for Jesus, even when all seems in terrible shape, is sometimes hard to do, but we are called to that. His command, not our success, is what leads us.

One Christmas in the Middle East

         First, my suitcase had been lost in transit. Second, my feet hurt. I had traveled for a couple of days in and out of airports from New York City to the Middle East.

         In my battered travel shoes and worn outfit, I wandered around the U.S.  consulate complex in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, finally finding my way to the gathering held to introduce me, the new U.S. consular officer, to my new neighbors, as the first Gulf war loomed in the background.

        I was older than most Foreign Service officers, having finally been accepted into the Foreign Service as I was approaching fifty years old. I also spoke with a decided Southern accent. Previous foreign travels included a couple of days in Canada when I was a teenager, plus a quick trip across the border to Mexico when my brother was stationed at a U.S. army base in Arizona.

      Somehow, I survived. A few days after the consulate gathering, I attended a Christmas celebration with a small number of mostly expatriate Christians, then went on to complete several Foreign Service tours against the background of momentous changes in the Middle East that we still are living with.

 

Enough for Everybody

            Mark 8:1-13: Jesus Feeds a Multitude

            It isn’t whether we have enough for everybody; of course, we have enough when we share. God shares with us; then we share with others.

            The Pharisees kept trying to trap Jesus. Here was God, in loving form, and they were concerned about a sign??

Less People?

What if less and less people are born, leading to the buying of less and less things?

Some observers suggest that after centuries of population growth, the earth could be entering a time of population decline.

What would population decline mean to our economic systems? For centuries, the goal of many of those systems has been to sell more and more things to more and more people.

What happens if merchants and businesses have less customers?

What happens, for example, if our purpose for buying housing is not to build an investment but only to have shelter and perhaps create a home?

How do we build a successful society in such radically changed circumstances?

Such a time might be awful, of course, with economic depression and empty houses.

Of course, we might decide to use such a time to build better communities. We might begin programs to buy empty houses and replace them with community gardens or even farms. We might emphasize inter-generational housing and smaller, close-knit neighborhoods. We might encourage small businesses, many of them family owned.

Change could be seen as an opportunity rather than a catastrophe.

No Kings Day

One of the things I admire about our country is the humor and enjoyment we are sometimes capable of, even in the middle of political conflict. No Kings Day was one of these times. We’ve seen much heavy political fighting in the past few years. Nice that we could just gather and enjoy peaceful gatherings, in a light-hearted way.

I hope we never lose the ability to laugh at ourselves. Not mean humor, just joking the way close knit families do.

A nation with the ability to laugh gently and not take life too seriously promises the gift of overcoming our disagreements and the continuation of building on our past accomplishments.

How Many of Us Can Stand Solitude?

Listening to a seminar on the founding of the country, I’m reminded of how few people inhabited the early United States, including native Americans. Even Europe and other continents included tracts of empty land.

Still, solitude may not have been easy to find. Long hours of labor, larger families crowded into smaller houses, neighborly needs—perhaps earlier folk strived for solitude as much as we do.

Solitude is a conscious decision to remove oneself from noise and chatter and simply to think, or to read slowly and reflect. Solitude should not be confused with loneliness, though the confusion, may be one reason solitude is neglected.

If solitude today is harder to find, it’s not only because population has increased significantly. I live in a semi-rural area where it’s still possible to walk away from my community into wooded areas. Driving my car for a short time, I can find trails where I can walk for an hour or two and not meet another person.

But we now have phones and carry them with us wherever we go. Some of us wake up and immediately check those phones. We get the news, good and bad, but mostly bad, before we’ve had breakfast.

Maybe this busy, hard wired way of life will change our brains, and we will no longer need solitude. I tend to doubt that. I suspect solitude, to varying degrees according to our natures, is as important to inner growth as is food to our physical bodies.

We are not merely flesh and bones. We also require spiritual feeding and sometimes must search for it.

 

Pray and Take Care of Your Neighbors

            Friday morning, October 4, 2025

I’m writing before I’ve checked today’s news. I don’t know what’s going on in Washington, D.C. or in Seattle, Washington, the nearest city to my home, or in any other place on the globe. When I checked yesterday, U.S. government offices were still closed, and people were protesting in various places in the U.S. Various threats were made by various people, political groups, and political leaders.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the time the government shut down when I was stationed at a U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia in the early part of this century (an age ago, it seems.) We were concerned about people needing emergency visas or new passports to travel to the U.S. How closed were we to those folks? And were we stuck forever in our foreign posts, with no orders coming out of the State Department? Eventually, things were sorted out, and normalcy more or less returned.

We’re concerned now about where federal troops may be stationed in the United States and who of our neighbors may be carried off and forcibly returned to their countries of origin, even if they may face persecution there for their political or religious beliefs. We don’t know what to do about our seeming inability to live within our means.

Pray and take care of your neighbors until we sort things out.

 

A Sense of Mission

In my novel, A Sense of Mission, the orphaned Kaitlin, just entering adolescence, explains why she has a hard time trusting the good times in her life. Influenced by the tragedy of her parents’ deaths, she says it’s “like some—monster—some weird creature from Lord of the Rings or something. Standing at this door that’s cracked half open. He’s staring at me while I’m feasting at a banquet.” She’s always scared they’ll disappear, as some of her good times did when her parents were killed.

Nothing is wrong with enjoying an occasional banquet. Jesus enjoyed banquets, even as he journeyed toward the cross.

Nevertheless, if we have experienced a true banquet, with people we love and enjoy being with, we may understand how powerful is the system that opposes the kinds of banquets Jesus talked about—those for the poor and hungry and imprisoned.

Ultimately, it isn’t about consumer spending or making America great or how many toys we can accumulate before we die. It’s about seeking to do good, even understanding that good may be overwhelmed at times.

 

How Many of Us Can Stand Solitude?

Listening to a seminar on the founding of the country, I’m reminded of how few people inhabited the early United States, including native Americans. Even Europe and other continents included tracts of empty land.

Still, solitude may not have been easy to find. Long hours of labor, larger families crowded into smaller houses, neighborly needs—perhaps earlier folk strived for solitude as much as we do.

Solitude is a conscious decision to remove oneself from noise and chatter and simply to think, or to read slowly and reflect. Solitude should not be confused with loneliness, though the confusion may be one reason solitude is neglected.

If solitude today is harder to find, it’s not only because population has increased significantly. I live in a semi-rural area where it’s still possible to walk away from my community into wooded areas. Driving my car for a short time, I can find trails where I can walk for an hour or two and not meet another person.

But we now have phones and carry them with us wherever we go. Some of us wake up and immediately check those phones. We get the news, good and bad, but mostly bad, before we’ve had breakfast.

Maybe this busy, hard-wired way of life will change our brains, and we will no longer need solitude. I tend to doubt that. I suspect solitude, to varying degrees according to our personalities, is as important to inner growth as food is to our physical bodies.

We are not merely flesh and bones. We also require spiritual feeding and sometimes must search for it.

 

Blessed Solitude

How Many of Us Can Stand Solitude?

Listening to a seminar on the founding of the country, I’m reminded of how few people inhabited the early United States, including native Americans. Even Europe and other continents included tracts of empty land.

Still, solitude may not have been easy to find. Long hours of labor, larger families crowded into smaller houses, neighborly needs—perhaps earlier folk strived for solitude as much as we do.

Solitude is a conscious decision to remove oneself from noise and chatter and simply to think, or to read slowly and reflect. Solitude should not be confused with loneliness, though the confusion, may be one reason solitude is neglected.

If solitude today is harder to find, it’s not only because population has increased significantly. I live in a semi-rural area where it’s still possible to walk away from my community into wooded areas. Driving my car for a short time, I can find trails where I can walk for an hour or two and not meet another person.

But we now have phones and carry them with us wherever we go. Some of us wake up and immediately check those phones. We get the news, good and bad, but mostly bad, before we’ve had breakfast.

Maybe this busy, hard wired way of life will change our brains, and we will no longer need solitude. I tend to doubt that. I suspect solitude, to varying degrees according to our natures, is as important to inner growth as is food to our physical bodies.

We are not merely flesh and bones. We also require spiritual feeding and sometimes must search for it.

 

 

 

Choosing the Imperfect

An interviewer for The Sun asked the writer, Jack Miles: “By signing up for an organized faith, am I not rejecting other religious truths?”

Miles answered, “Well, any choice limits us. You can’t practice religion in general; you have to practice one religion. You can’t marry all women or all men; you have to marry one person. OK, you might be a bigamist, but there are limits. And where there are limits, there are choices.”

We choose between imperfect candidates in an election, but we have to finally vote. Not to vote is to scorn the precious right to collectively choose our leaders.

We choose a faith for the sake of meaning and purpose and direction in our lives. We choose between admittedly imperfect and incomplete choices, for none of us has perfect knowledge, but even choosing to be an atheist is a faith choice.

To choose is not, or should not, be the denigration of what is not chosen. The fact that we are fallible human beings means we honor the different choices of others.

But we have need of spiritual choices so as not to waste our precious lives in aimlessness.

Cultural Concoction

Try growing up in the early post-World War II culture of Middle Tennessee, then add early adulthood in a rapidly changing deep South college followed by several early marriage years lived between rural Tennessee and big city Chicago. After that, stir in several years of a U.S. Foreign Service career in the Middle East and Washington, D.C. Then add a move to a Pacific Northwest island community. How’s that for a life of change?

Well, if the one constant in your life is the compulsion to write fiction (mostly) to capture the ideas that keep bubbling up through all this, you do have plenty of material.

None of this has led to a particularly successful writing career. I’ve not written a best-seller or anything near it, despite abundant material.

I don’t think, though, that, even if I had tried, I would have been able not to write. Gardeners garden, teachers teach, writers write.

I am so grateful that no matter how successful I may or may not be, I had and have people in my life who cared and care about me and the world around us. It really is, of course, about the caring. If we are cared for and learn to care about the people in our lives, even extending that care to desperate people as we are given opportunity, then we are successful in what counts.

Five Suggestions for Dealing With That Annoying Telemarketer

1. Tell them you are so glad they called because now you have someone to share your sorrow at the death of Creepy, your beloved pet tarantula, which you will then begin to detail.

2. Use them to let off steam about whichever political party has recently upset you.

3. Share your ancestry—how proud you are of your something great grandfather who served as a cook in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.

4. Tell them about your recently discovered interest in lobotomy. (Don’t know what that is? Make something up.)

5. Ask them if they have ever talked to a being from outer space like you recently did. Begin sharing your experience.

Choosing the Imperfect

An interviewer for The Sun asked the writer, Jack Miles: “By signing up for an organized faith, am I not rejecting other religious truths?”

Miles answered, “Well, any choice limits us. You can’t practice religion in general; you have to practice one religion. You can’t marry all women or all men; you have to marry one person. OK, you might be a bigamist, but there are limits. And where there are limits, there are choices.”

We choose between imperfect candidates in an election, but we have to finally vote. Not to vote is to scorn the precious right to collectively choose our leaders.

We choose a faith for the sake of meaning and purpose and direction in our lives. We choose between admittedly imperfect and incomplete choices, for none of us has perfect knowledge, but even choosing to be an atheist is a faith choice.

To choose is not, or should not, be the denigration of what is not chosen. The fact that we are fallible human beings means we honor the different choices of others.

But we have need of spiritual choices so as not to waste our precious lives in aimlessness.

So, What Do You Mean by “Christian” Nation?

Growing up, I lived, perhaps, in a place fairly close to a Christian nation—at least, if you mean where the Christian Bible was read every day in my public school class before lessons began. And, if you mean Christianity was the default, and you wouldn’t dare run for public office before checking the boxes of Christianity.

Of course, the water fountains, when I was a preschooler, were double—one for “colored” and one for “white.”

Thankfully, the double water fountains disappeared. The lines between the races, however, did not disappear. I was in high school before segregated school systems were ruled unconstitutional. And we all know that, for practical purposes, housing segregation remained.

Please understand: I think a nation where people loved God with all their being and their neighbors as themselves would be a great place to live. That’s not usually what we mean by “Christian” nation though. It has to do with outer practices: Bibles verses being read, not necessarily followed, for example.

We so often go with outer practices, not ones of the heart. Freedom of religion means no one religion is forced on anyone.

Christianity, like any other religion, would compete. How Christians lived, not how they preached, would be the deciding factor as to its spread. Come to think of it, I think that’s what happened when it began.

A Need for Youth

A community needs a continuing source of new members in order to flourish. Otherwise, over time, it stagnates and dies.

For obvious reasons, the only community assured of continuing renewal is the family. It’s the only community which creates new members—provided young women and men continue to join in responsible relationships.

Simply having babies doesn’t count. Babies and children need care from parents and the larger community. The young are helpless and cannot flourish without care. Children without care drain a community’s resources.

Other communities besides the family also may welcome children. Religious communities are often gatherers of the young. Recently, the growth of youth with no religious affiliation has led to some decline of these communities.

Today, associative types of communities—popularized by digital membership—grow rapidly. So do casual relationships.

How will we meet our needs for the more traditional physical and emotional joining?

America’s Decline?

A popular question in current political and news magazines asks: “Is America a declining nation?” Have we, after wielding perhaps the greatest power in the western world since the Roman Empire, finally gone over the top and are now started on our way down?

An article in Foreign Affairs discusses this question in “The End of the Long American Century; Trump and the Sources of U.S. Power (” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2025.) President Donald Trump, the authors say, “misses a major dimension of power. Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. This goal can be accomplished by coercion, payment, or attrition. The first two are hard power; the third is soft power. In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power, but over the long term, soft power often prevails.”

America certainly made mistakes in the last third of the twentieth century, when the Soviet Union declined and disappeared while western nations increased economically and politically. However, most of the world saw the United States as basically a force for good in a struggle with the Soviet bloc. I have in my files a picture of young Europeans clustered around American diplomats visiting Europe shortly after the Soviet Union fell, the young people eager to discuss ideas with them.

We and the allied powers, survivors of World War II, had now defeated the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist as of December 25, 1991, without war.

We played a good hand and won, but now other conflicts are following on the heals of that victory: Israel/Palestine; Ukraine/Russia; China/Taiwan; conflicts in Mali and other African nations.

The need is not for armies but for peacemakers and persuaders. Can the U.S. remake itself again, into the soft power now called for?

Public Schools and Religion

I’m against teaching religion in the public schools or making any religion, including Christianity, a state religion.

I’ve lived in some countries where a particular religion was the national religion and was taught in the public schools. Usually it wasn’t the Christian religion. Christian families often sent their children to private schools, including ones run by Christian organizations. Many of the families were fairly well-off expatriates who had the money to do so. Others took advantage of home schooling.

I’m a Christian, but I don’t want public schools favoring my religion any more that I want them favoring one I don’t follow. I don’t want public schools favoring any religion. For one, I think it likely that having a religion forced on you would be a way to encourage you to resent it. More than that, I know of few religions more likely to grow when built on private choice than the one Jesus preached, taught, and died for.

Love God with all your being and your neighbor as yourself were the two greatest commandments, Jesus said. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all they soul, and with all thy might. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:35-40)

Jesus commanded his followers to love, as he loved. He allowed himself to be taken and executed rather than choosing conquest and forcing others to accept his kingdom by physical might.

I certainly don’t want to force on others a religion Jesus himself refused to force on anyone.

“I Hope You Give My Money to Some Nice Country”

That quote came from an older American, years ago, during the height of the cold war. Our foreign aid program was increasing, due to Soviet aggression in eastern Europe and a changing China in Asia. Perhaps our aid could be seen as enlightened self-interest. We were paying for a stronger defense that included nations on the periphery, hoping that our aid might swing the balance our way.

Perhaps much of our foreign policy can be seen as a mixture of self interest and true altruism. Particularly in the years immediately following World War II, altruism was foremost. Remember those old pictures of children waiting for American food drops after the Berlin Wall isolated eastern Germany? People were literally starving as countries suffered from the results of broken trade and bombed out cities.

Perhaps our evolving foreign aid was a step up from the wars Europe was saddled with for centuries, wars for obvious conquest. Still, it’s not always certain which attitude is paramount in our aid. Help for needy populations or one more weapon against our enemies?

Also, what influence in other countries will our colleges and universities continue to have, dependent on the numbers of young foreigners coming for higher education in the United States? We are becoming aware of how much our foreign students have contributed to paying for our schools. Now, less aid to higher education, in the form of halting grants and tax breaks threatens those schools. We have seen some of the most influential medical research in the world coming from scholars, paid for by federal grants. What will happen if such grants are decided by how much deference is given to our political parties?

Political parties and election grandstanding are inevitable. Certainly, public tax money should be subject to review. However, grants that serve obvious public good, such as medical research, need the certainty that public funds will allow continuation in the public good until finished, not subject to political whim.